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Nine hundred and fifty-five meters up in the Pentadaktylos mountains, a ruined fortress looks down on both coasts of Cyprus at once. Locals call the wind up there vicious enough to knock a person off the walls, which is where the castle got its name: Buffavento, “buffeted by the wind.” But long before anyone worried about the gusts, they worried about who — or what — was said to still be living inside.
The Real Fortress First
Buffavento Castle is not a folklore invention. It was built by the Byzantines in the late 11th or early 12th century, likely under Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, as a watchtower against Arab raiders working the northern coast. Its job was simple and brutal in its logic: sit high enough to see ships coming, and pass the warning on by smoke or beacon fire to the neighboring fortresses of St. Hilarion and Kantara, forming a relay chain across the mountain range.
In 1191, the castle changed hands during one of Cyprus's stranger historical footnotes. Richard the Lionheart, on his way to the Third Crusade, seized the island from the self-declared Byzantine ruler Isaac Komnenos — and took Buffavento along with it, reportedly from Isaac's own daughter. Under the Lusignan dynasty that followed, the castle lost its purely military role and became something closer to a prison and signal post, holding prisoners of rank in a place from which escape down the mountain was close to unthinkable. By the early 1500s, the Venetians — who had absorbed Cyprus and judged the old mountain forts obsolete against gunpowder-era siege warfare — deliberately dismantled Buffavento along with St. Hilarion and Kantara rather than maintain them.
What's left today is a ruin: broken stairways, roofless chambers, walls that fall away into the mountainside. There is no treasure vault in the archaeological record. That part comes from somewhere else entirely.
Enter Rigaina, “The Queen”
Cypriot oral tradition attaches a single recurring figure to all three of the Pentadaktylos castles — Buffavento, St. Hilarion, and Kantara — a legendary queen known simply as Rigaina, Greek Cypriot dialect for “the Queen.” She isn't tied to one documented historical ruler; she functions instead as folklore's explanation for ruins nobody could otherwise account for. Beautiful, powerful, and dangerous to cross, Rigaina is described as having ruled from these mountaintop strongholds before vanishing from them, by death, by flight, or — in some tellings — by simply passing into legend rather than history.
The treasure story is the part that survives best. According to the version most often told around Buffavento specifically, Rigaina hid a vast fortune in a secret chamber somewhere within the castle before she disappeared. The chamber's door, the story goes, opens only once a year: at midnight on New Year's Eve. Anyone who happens to be standing at the right spot at the right moment could, in theory, walk in and claim it — provided they get out again before the door seals for another twelve months. A related strand of the legend counts the castle's rooms at exactly 101 and promises that whoever finds and passes through the lost 101st room inherits Rigaina's fortune outright.
Neither version specifies what happens to someone still inside when midnight ends. Cypriot ghost-story tradition tends to leave that part to the listener's imagination, which is usually the point.
Myth Doing a Historian's Job
What makes Rigaina worth taking seriously as folklore, rather than dismissing as a simple ghost story, is the work she's doing. Byzantine watchtowers, Crusader prisons, Venetian demolition — none of that is intuitive to a villager looking up at broken stone walls with no plaque and no obvious explanation. A queen who built it, hid something valuable in it, and vanished is a far more usable story: it answers “why is this here” in one sentence, and it gives a strange, empty, wind-battered ruin a reason to be worth the climb.
Cyprus has leaned into the legend rather than let it fade. The Central Bank of Cyprus issued a commemorative silver coin featuring the myth of Rigaina, and hiking guides to Buffavento routinely mention her before they mention Alexios Komnenos. The real history and the invented queen have effectively merged into one story that tour groups hear on the way up the mountain — which is, in its own way, a second life for a fortress the Venetians tried to erase five hundred years ago.
Whether or not the door to Rigaina's chamber opens on any given New Year's Eve, the climb itself is real, the wind is real, and the eight-century-old stonework under your feet is real. The treasure is the only part anyone still has to take on faith.
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